Julie Murphy’s latest middle-grade foray, Camp Sylvania (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, June 6), brings fresh blood to the genre of summer camp horror stories. With fifth grade behind her, Maggie Hagen is ready for a life-changing summer of performance arts with her best friend. Her parents, determined to rid her of her “baby fat,” have other plans. When the fat camp where she finds herself turns out to be even more sinister than one might anticipate, it’s up to Maggie and her friends to rescue their peers and salvage some joy to boot. Our review calls it a “fun and spooky celebration of fat kids and friendship.” Murphy spoke with us over Zoom from her Texas home; the conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

A theme that comes up in this book is the censorship of bodies—the kids at the camp are forbidden from using the word fat.

I’m a former librarian, so censorship has always been a big part of the conversation for me. When I came up with this idea that the kids wouldn’t be allowed to use “the F-word,” it was because I wasn’t allowed to use that word growing up. It’s how I identified myself, it’s how I viewed my body, and yet because I wasn’t allowed to use the word, it became a negative thing for me. When you censor things, you weaponize them, and you make them feel dangerous.

It also points to the idea of fat camps as spaces where children are responsible for making themselves acceptable in the eyes of adults.

It’s funny, because as a kid, I dreamed of going to a fat camp. When I was growing up in the ’90s and early aughts, fat camps were at the height of their popularity. It felt like such an exciting opportunity, that I would come back as a whole new person and have that magical post-summer makeover moment. Now, looking back and seeing how that was my fantasy because that was what the adults in my life fantasized for me—that’s pretty broken.

We get to see Maggie model for us how a child can speak to their caregiver and say “Hey, you hurt me.” The adults in this book are, by and large, imperfect humans.

I do think every author has four or five themes that they are constantly circling, and one of those things that I’m really obsessed with is the moment when [as an adolescent] you realize the adults in your life don’t know everything. They’re just as human and clueless as you are. [Adults] may be able to mentally metabolize things in more nuanced ways, but we still don’t have all the answers. We still don’t know the secret of transforming yourself so that you feel more comfortable in the world. Because the answer, of course, is that it’s not a physical transformation: You have to recatalog the world around you and your role in that world.

How does your background as a librarian shape how you think about writing, particularly in the face of censorship?

Early in my career, when I was still beginning my transition from libraries to writing full time, that was at the forefront of my mind. I was writing against something, writing in protest of something. I think I’m still doing that, but I’ve settled more into my own, and I’ve found that I’m no longer writing so much in opposition as I am now in authenticity.

Speaking of authenticity: You have some real, intense friendships going on in this book.

The relationships I remember rocking my world when I was in middle school and high school—those weren’t romantic relationships. The romances were happening in my head with famous people who didn’t know me or random people on AOL chat I had no business talking to. They weren’t relationships. The connections that helped me navigate my everyday life and changed my mood and impacted how I went toe to toe with the big scaries in my life: Those were my friendships. Those were the relationships that had the power to save me or devastate me.

Jealousy was a big emotion of my middle school years, and it was important for me to learn to harness it. I needed to let my jealousy help me decide what I wanted with my life and not let it become a weapon in my friendships.

I hate how we vilify the emotion of jealousy. Jealousy has inspired me to do some of the biggest, most exciting things in my life. I wouldn’t be an author if I hadn’t been jealous of what other people had. I wouldn’t have pursued working in libraries. I do think it can turn into an awful thing, but I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to experience.

This makes me think of desire and how desire and appetite are vilified.

Absolutely. Appetite is an important signal, and so is joy. Wanting to eat food that interests you, whether that’s because of the memories tied to it or the way it tastes: When did that become a bad thing?

I think of Maggie’s simultaneous desire to perform on a stage and the ways she dreads the experience.

I was talking to a friend recently about flying and how we hate standing up in the middle of the flight, because suddenly we’re being perceived, and Don’t perceive me. I don’t want to be looked at, I don’t want to be perceived, and yet I have this career based on writing books. I have to have a certain amount of ego to write a book and believe it’s good enough for you to read it, but I’ll still feel uncomfortable standing up on an airplane in front of everyone.

Alongside the friendships, you also have the budding romance between Maggie and Logan.

A middle school romance really forces you to break down the process of developing a crush into the smallest, bite-sized pieces. When I was that age, I wasn’t having crazy moments where I ran away to meet a boy. We were having sweet moments in passing or in group settings. Those moments were little crumbs that my imagination feasted on for weeks. Writing about that was fun, and so was seeing two fat kids have these flirtation moments. In the setting of the camp, being fat is base line. Suddenly, the inhibitions around fatness and romance are gone. Kids can figure out what they want without the same constraints of shame.

The summer-camp setting is a good one in terms of giving young protagonists a lot of space without adults, figuring things out on their own.

What I loved about camp growing up was that you could really be an entirely new person. People don’t know that you’re not popular back home, people don’t know about that embarrassing thing you did. It was this opportunity to be whomever you wanted for two weeks. It was also a safe space to figure out how to exist without your usual constraints or supports. As a librarian, that was always the one argument that people trying to ban books couldn’t get through. Books are a safe space to experience scary things. How are you going to tell me that that’s a bad thing?

Ilana Bensussen Epstein is a writer and filmmaker in Boston.